A former RC Mission Corps volunteer reflects back on what he learned during a year that was “a wild mixture of the maniac and the mature.”

Tim Moots

In the following testimony, former RC Mission Corps volunteer
Timothy Moots recalls two major “testing points” during his year
as a volunteer.

The clock just ticked 2:30 in the afternoon
and, watching cars drive by on the highway in this
breezy, summer day in Atlanta, I’m already longing for 5
o’clock to arrive. The long, tedious struggle to master the
complexities of my company’s document storage drive and its new
management software has slowly been draining all my energy. My
phone, however, buzzes quietly on my desk, and with the
push of a button, the screen reveals that Fr. Jason
Smith, LC, my director in New York for the last
year, is looking forward to seeing my testimony when I
send it in tomorrow. Chuckling at his clever reminder and
thankful for the excuse to take a break, I find
soon myself recalling scores of nudging texts, ridiculous jokes, and
off-the-wall situations that characterized my last year. Compared with the
work in front of me, I’ll take the journey through
these welcome distractions, and I’d like to bring you along
with me.

The Regnum Christi Mission Corps volunteer program begins
with a month-long training course in July and ends in
late May or early June of the following year. The
experience which falls in between offers such a vast array
of opportunities and lessons: I can’t quite imagine any other
year with such a wild mixture of the maniac and
the mature. The responsibilities, the people, the events, and the
resulting combination of all three is, simply put, a crash
course in humanity.

In my experience and my observation of the
experiences of those around me, this crash course in humanity
contains two major tests or maturing points—exams on the syllabus
if you will. As I dive further into this idea,
I notice that at different times during the year, my
fellow missionaries each indicated exactly when they realized they had
passed these milestones. The missionary reaches his first major milestone
when he gets steamrolled by the freight train of “how-did-I-just-do-that”
and realizes he has a skill he never had the
chance to explore. I remember that moment clearly when I
took the microphone to give the first talk of our
first retreat of the year and finished wondering where I’d
learned to speak like that. For the others with me
it came at their first talks, first camps, or first
responses from their audience. Nevertheless, along the way, each missionary
experienced this same self-awakening of some ability they had never
known, a gift from the program.

At one point in early
March, teaching my umpteenth CCD class, I looked up from
my desk, watching most of the class work and the
few trouble-makers not-so-secretly whispering in the corner. I noticed one
of the quiet and sweet but inattentive kids fooling around
in the back with. Quizzically staring at him just before
I silenced the group, I recalled all the different moments
in the past few months I had seen this well-behaved
student connecting more and more with the bad influences in
the class. Sitting back in the chair still connecting the
dots, I suddenly grasped that this boy realized being bad
might bring unwanted attention, but at least it was attention.
The kid had mirrored my fifth grade path so perfectly
he could have won an Oscar.

The second test in the
course, self-reflection, halts the missionary speechless in his shoes as
the idea dawns upon him: This is me at their
age. By this I mean that while the missionary uses
the new skill he’s pulled from the closet as much
as he can, he cannot make the missionary year a
personal crusade until he sees himself and then Christ in
the kids around him. As he rides back from giving
a retreat, directing a youth group, camp, or class he
slowly comes to grips with why he is here: So
that they won’t turn out like I could have without
God’s grace.

All of the missionaries who I spoke with voiced
these same sentiments as a crucial result of their giving
a year. Without the incredible opportunities offered by the Mission
Corps, we could not have experienced such raw humanity with
the purpose of sanctifying it. I cannot thank all those
who helped and supported me along this journey enough. I
also continue to pray for those whom I met and
worked with every day: Thank you for the opportunity; give
others the same love you showed me. Thank you.